An Unwelcome Easter Custom in Times Square: Violence

The police closed 41st Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues.Credit
Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times

In the waning hours of Sunday, what has become something of a violent Easter night ritual began to unfold. Hundreds of people filled Times Square, some pouring out of the subway, howling and unruly. By night’s end, four people had been shot, and the police had arrested 33 people.

Whether gang related or expressions of youthful mischief, the violence well exceeded the outbursts in other years. It was enough that when Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg sought a word to describe the chaos, he chose “wilding,” a term that first became popular in 1989 in connection with the infamous Central Park jogger rape case, a time when crime in the city was at its highest.

“The mayhem in Midtown appears to be a bunch of gang members wilding,” the mayor said at a news conference on Monday. “There’s a bunch of people that think it’s cute to go out and to run around and to cause chaos, and we loaded the area up with police, but they can’t be everywhere.”

Though none of the shooting injuries on Sunday were life threatening, the violence comes as the mayor has expressed concern about an uptick in homicides in the city. Crime rates remain among the lowest in the city’s history, but coupled with a shrinking police force brought on by tough economic times, any spike in violence can put city officials and residents on edge.

“It was nothing but chaos,” said Kyle Tuck, 22, an actor and bartender’s assistant from East Harlem, who arrived at Times Square around 11 p.m. to pick up his girlfriend from the Ruby Tuesday restaurant. “My heart was racing.”

“They were fighting up and down the street,” another witness, Coby Niemeier, 19, said. “All you saw were kids running.”

Officials are uncertain how the Easter night melees came into being. Police officials say they first noticed the unruly crowds in 2003, believing it to be an outgrowth of revelers spilling out from the International Auto Show at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center at 11th Avenue and 34th Street. Its first weekend, and one of its busiest, typically falls at Easter.

The next year, the police added extra patrols, including antigang units, to Times Square and the area around the convention center. Arrests usually numbered in the high teens or low 20s. In 2006, a teenager was stabbed; the next year, a teenager was slashed in the arm. Last year, there were 27 arrests, the most until this year.

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This year, the participants seemed to have mostly skipped the auto show. Chris Sams, a spokesman for the show who has worked there the last 12 years, said that while the police had said there were gang colors at the show in the past, that was not the case on Sunday.

“Our crowd was very family oriented,” he said. “Lots of strollers.”

Around Times Square, some business owners and workers are convinced that Easter has become a gang initiation night, drawing people from every borough. While two of the people arrested were found to be on the Police Department’s gang database, and witnesses said that in the streets there was plenty of clothing in blue and red — the traditional colors for the Crips and Bloods street gangs — the police discounted the notion that this was a gang event.

“We’ve seen this as the car show and or Times Square on Easter night being a draw for a lot of unruly youth,” said Deputy Commissioner Paul J. Browne, the department’s chief spokesman. “Right now, 2 of those 33 were in the gang database; that’s not to say some others were not gang members. But there is no information suggesting that this was like an initiation as some people have described it.”

The police initially reported that there had been 54 arrests but later said that they had mistakenly added nearly two dozen summonses to the count.

The charges ranged from disorderly conduct to the most serious allegations, gang assault, a term that does not refer to street gangs but to an episode in which three or more people assault one person. Four people were charged with gang assault. Three people were also arrested for carrying knives.

By Monday night, no one had been charged with any of the shootings. The first shooting was reported at 12:08 a.m., after a 21-year-old man was shot in the ankle on 41st Street near Eighth Avenue, outside The New York Times Building. He was being treated on Monday at Bellevue Hospital Center. About 20 minutes after that shooting, a group approached a 21-year-old woman and shot her in the face with a BB gun. She was treated at St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital Center and released.

At 2:08 a.m., near Pennsylvania Station, two 19-year-old women were shot, one in an arm and one in a leg, during a fight. It was unclear if they were involved in the fight or were unintended victims. Four people were arrested and charged with gang assault in that case, the police said. None were thought to have fired the gun, the police said.

Zane Tankel, chief executive officer of Apple-Metro Inc., a restaurant franchise group that runs the Applebee’s at Times Square, said he had hired extra security for Sunday anticipating the crowds, which he said had grown increasingly turbulent over the last five years. “These things become viral,” he said. “They take root.”

John Eligon contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on April 6, 2010, on Page A22 of the New York edition with the headline: An Unwelcome Easter Custom in Times Square: Violence. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe